That Reminds Me was a weekly column published in the Bletchley Gazette from January 1973 to December 1978.
Originally from Yorkshire, Harold (Heppy) Hepworth had worked on The Gazette for twenty years. He preferred to describe himself as a reporter, though his title was officially Leader Writer or Assistant Editor. Later, we believe after his retirement, he began this series of articles on a wide variety of topics – though mostly about life and the characters in Bletchley. Our volunteers Wendy Williams and Penny Perdue have transcribed these stories and we present them now, as before, in a regular offering.
Creator
Harold Hepworth for the Bletchley Gazette
Place
Bletchley
Reference number
TRM
Records in this Collection
Occasionally there comes into the hands of local newspapers material which is of historical interest. This happened to the Gazette in 1949 through a letter from Mr E. Troughton, who lived at Weymouth, but who spent the first 19 years of his long life at Water Eaton in the 1870s and 1880s and who often ...
I note with a certain amount of interest that the Eight Bells Field at Bletchley is in the news again, thanks to a fair that pitched there recently. Incidentally, I insist on spelling it “Bells,” not “Belles,” for reasons I hope to explain at some other time.
The authorities have been talking about what to do ...
You may have been astonished by the recent cigarette-smoking confessions of five of the youngest members of the Gazette’s reporting staff. Frankly, I was not. I was astonished only at the fact that at times their consumption rose to as many as 30 cigarettes a day. I also felt a little envious that they could ...
One of the oldest firms in Bletchley who are still operating from their original site are the well-known drapers, A G Cowlishaw and Son, whose business in Aylesbury Street, Fenny Stratford, was founded in 1912 or 1913.
But the Cowlishaw connection with Fenny goes back further – to the time last century when Mr John Cowlishaw, ...
No development is more significant of the rapid growth of the new city than the recent opening of the big new postal sorting office – the “Mount Pleasant” of Milton Keynes. It may be said to mark the end of one epoch and the beginning of another in the postal service.
The appointment of Bletchley as ...
Fenny Stratford has been the birthplace of three newspapers, only one of which – your Gazette – survives. The histories of the first and third are fairly well known.
The first to appear was the Fenny Stratford Weekly Times. Its No 1 issue is dated August 21, 1879. Its title was changed to the North Bucks ...
I note with lively interest the decision of Milton Keynes Borough Council finance director Mr Norman Chambers to retire at what is at present regarded as the early age of 55.
I know nothing of the background to this retirement, but I presume it is simply a case of a man being able to see his ...
I join the greetings to Mrs Julia Phillips, who has just retired from the Bletchley bench of magistrates on reaching the age limit of 70.
She is best known to myself and other old stagers under the name of her first husband, the late Mr Jim Ramsbotham, for it was as Mrs Julia Ramsbotham that she ...
Our village grocer-cum-postmaster-cum-newsagent and tobacconist suffered from a chronic flatulence. A short, tubby man of around 50, he wore a white pinafore and walrus moustache. What fascinated me as a child, however, was that each time his knife sliced through a piece of ham or whatever, he emitted a loud and rumbling “B-hoy!”. Since when ...
Local relics of the Second World War keep popping up. Each one is a reminder of the conditions in Bletchley and District at that time and of its total commitment to the war effort.
The latest to come to my hand is a copy of a works magazine. It is not dated, but the contents seem ...
The pending closure of M A Cook and Sons’ brushworks in Victoria Road, Bletchley – a voluntary dissolution, not made for any financial reasons – will leave Beacon Brushes Ltd. the sole remaining representatives of an industry on which the town formerly relied for a good deal of its employment.
Indeed, it is not too much ...
One day during the recent hot spell I was in a works canteen. It was hotter there than in the works and I admit I felt suitably frizzled. Three or four lads in their late teens and early 20s came in. They were puffing and blowing. Then another chap who could not have been older ...
In my article last week on the summer weather I mentioned that according to one source of information 1921 was the driest year this century, with a rainfall of only about half the norm.
I have special cause to remember that long warm summer, for my father was a coal miner and that year saw the ...
On the day Milton Keynes children went back to school after the summer holidays, a woman came on the radio (I nearly wrote “on the wireless”) and talked for a few minutes about children’s games. Not the sort of organised games they play at school, but the sort they play when they are out on ...
The week before the late-August Bank Holidays two young men whom I shall call Bash and Brut suggested I should go with them on a four-day camping holiday at Weymouth, along with Bash’s little dog. This was to be a preliminary to a more ordinary six-day visit Bash and I would be making to Yorkshire ...
Over a period of many years I reported soccer at all levels from the second division of the Football League downwards. Curiously enough, I covered the game in that order; descending in the leagues, as it were, as time went by.
Actually, my earliest years of football reporting were not concerned with soccer at all. Rugby ...
The various TV programmes about the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway – the first public railway in the world – have been watched with peculiar interest not only by this district’s still considerable body of railwaymen and their families but by a growing number of amateur “fans” as well.
Indeed, ...
Some recent notes in this column have stirred memories and people have kindly got in touch with me to tell me so.
One is Mr Wal Pacey, of Bletchley, who was reminded of the celebrations held at Tolpuddle, in 1934, the hundredth anniversary of the Martyrs’ transportation to Australia.
In the decades since the war Wal has ...
In 1896 Signor Marconi was conducting his early wireless experiments on Salisbury Plain in co-operation with the British Army. They were using aerials held aloft by kites and balloons. Maintaining liaison between the transmitter and the receiver was young Sapper Alfred James Peerless, later to be the father of Mr Ken and Mr Bob Peerless, ...
This has been called the Age of Plastics. And quite rightly, I think. When I was young, practically all those things now made of poly-this, that and the other, and of bakelite or some other ite, were made of wood or metal or both.
The only articles I remember which remotely resembled today’s plastics were those ...
There seems to be an impression – and not only among newcomers – that Bletchley once “owned” Bletchley Park, and that the various government departments there have only to be persuaded to leave for Bletchley to get it back. I remember being under the same illusion when I came to the town close on 30 ...
In the early 1950’s, Bletchley Young Conservatives decided to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day with a special bonfire in a field off Drayton Road.
A large amount of combustible material was collected and stacked and by November 4, all was ready for a good old beano on “The Fifth.” But during the night of the fourth, the ...
In almost every case of “local boy makes good” there is an original “break” – some piece of ingenuity, luck, wisdom or derring-do that puts him on the road to success.
I have noticed this many times when interviewing or even just talking with such men in their more expansive moments.
There is often a catalogue of ...
Are you in your late forties? And, if so, are you apt to be critical of the world around you and especially of today’s youth? If you are, then what follows should interest you. It concerns the years 1946 to 1948, when you yourself were a teenager and Oh…so Righteous.
There is too much promiscuity today, ...
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